


loose me when ye list, for i am bound

by magpie mountains (hollowmen)



Category: Arthurian Mythology
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'Gawain grew up as a poor fisherman's foster son' backstory variant, and a surprising amount of fruit, and then fished out like scrabble tiles to make words like 'ixghezsnootle' and 'wapotato', featuring several hundred years of medieval customs jumbled gloriously together, how many ways can i hint at pegging without actually making it About Pegging, really more of a semi-plausible interpretation of canon events
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:01:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28148013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollowmen/pseuds/magpie%20mountains
Summary: “I married you for your lands,” she tells him, and Gawain thinks it a fine jest until they reach Blanchemal Hall.
Relationships: Gawain/Dame Ragnelle
Comments: 21
Kudos: 51
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	1. Gawain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FitzKreiner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FitzKreiner/gifts).



> "This apparently innocent request on Ragnell's part to marry Gawain becomes quite intriguing in the context of her sibling relationship with Gromer, and Gawain's [possession] of the lands which her brother claims are his. The rancor between Sir Gromer Somer Joure and Dame Ragnell actually might derive from competition for their family lands, possession of which would integrate one of them to court society and would confer upon one title, status, authority and wealth." - Forste-Grupp, _A Woman Circumvents The Laws of Primogeniture_ , 115.

“I married you for your lands,” she tells him, and Gawain thinks it a fine jest until they come within sight of Blanchemal, when his wife turns her palfrey off the track and into the deep green shadows of the forest.

There are tales of men following bright-eyed women into unruled wildernesses—forests, usually, this far inland, but Gawain grew up hearing of oceans—and never returning. Or returning, but lost, dazed at a hundred years gone and their old lives spilled like water through their fingers, leaving only the taste of salt behind. They are warnings, of course, but Gawain has already wed one of these women, so he turns his horse and follows her into the trees.

* * *

This deep in the forest, moss clings to everything. Water runs unseen over stones, murmuring nonsense; high overhead, the branches shiver and rustle with voices, and the red-gold of his wife’s hair blazes up when it catches what little light falls through the leaves. Gawain follows the flame of her between blackened birches and torn, toppled oaks, growing steadily more curious until half a league later, his wife disappears in the dimness between one oak and the next.

He rides on, untroubled. He is learning her, still, but already he knows she will not lose him—and indeed, a little further on he finds her dismounted in the deep gouges of a dry riverbed, wrestling with a gate set in the rocks. When he goes to her, she darts him a sly, sideways glance, smiling welcome. “Ah, husband, I need you,” she says, as if she does not know what it does to him, those words in her lovely rough voice. “Would you—yes, there, and up a little.”

For his aid, she presses him against the gate and kisses him hard until the gate complains, and they stumble backwards into waist-high bracken and she decides to follow him, laughing, down between the ferns. Afterwards, he picks leaves from her bright hair and she is of no help whatsoever, doing her best instead to distract him with her mouth, and then a little while later they go through an orchard full wild as the forest. A wind is rippling through the trees; apricots and the first of the year’s apples brush the shoulders of her palfrey, who tries to lip at them, shaking several down into the grass. Windfall damsons turn to mud underfoot. The crushed smell of mingled rot and sweetness rises with every step they take, and his wife wades through bracken and looks and looks about her as if she cannot look enough, a hunger he has never seen before rising in her face like the tide.

Something about it leaves him oddly stricken at the sight. He does not know why, except that it makes him think of her face when they wed, scant weeks ago—cursed still, and the foulest imaginable, but lit up by that fierce, pleased want in her dark eyes. She had looked at him that way across hall and church and table and the fragile space between them in their chambers, that first night, and even then he had shuddered under the touch of it, revulsion and a strange, aching pleasure working him slowly open under her gaze.

But the true blaze of her hunger, now, casts that as the shadow it was. Even as she speaks with him, reaching for his hand, laughing, her eyes turn again and again to the white walls of Blanchemal rising before them—for it is Blanchemal’s orchard they walk through, and Blanchemal’s towers she turns her face towards with relentless, tender joy in her eyes, and Gawain knows, now, why she would have only him in all the king’s court.


	2. Ragnelle

Her husband is in bed when she returns, the plums in her skirt heavy and so ripe that the ones at the bottom are crushed already. She can feel them dripping through the wool of her gown; her smock clings as she steps out of her muddy pattens and across the rushes to where Gawain lies awake still, staring up at the canopy. As well he might; Ragnelle knows without looking the riot of green and scarlet arching over the bed, vines so thickly tangled they writhe like snakes when the light flickers over them. 

It is dizzying, she knows; there is an enchantment stitched into it that takes and holds the eye prisoner, the kind of craft her stepmother was skilled at. When she perches on the edge of the bed beside him, though, hitching her skirts higher to keep the plums in her lap, her husband turns his face to her. She smiles at him. “These are sweetest,” she says. “Here. Try this.”

Lately, he has been smiling back at her as if he cannot help but do so. He does this now, taking the plum from her fingers and putting it obediently to his mouth, and Ragnelle watches, caught: her husband, in her home and her bed. The long bare line of his shoulders, rising from the bedclothes; the bob of his throat as he swallows, his eyes on hers. All the strange and changing skies of his lovely face. All afternoon, clouds have been gathering in his eyes—darker now in the inconstancy of candles and the fire in its hearth—and she has guessed at their names, but she is too new to him to map them truly.

She reaches over instead to touch his hair. “What is it?”

Her husband is silent a little, in the way that means he is thinking. “You married me for my lands,” he says, eventually, and the laughter is gone, fled from his voice. Ragnelle hesitates and then tucks her hand back into her skirts.

“Yes? I have always said so.” She studies him, trying to decipher the breath he lets out at this, the downcast sweep of his lashes. “Is marrying you for Blanchemal so much worse than marrying you to loose myself from my stepdame's working?”

Oh but it troubles her still, the grave way he considers her words. She watches him turn her question over with the same attentiveness he shows his uncle’s requests, his aunt’s advice—his uncle, the _king_ ; his aunt, the _queen_ —and feels, again, as if he is loosening a knot inside her lungs with careful, gentle fingers. Once undone, she thinks, it will leave her tumbled apart in his hands, bared entirely to the touch of his mouth on her, the tenderness in his voice when he shapes her name. It frightens her, in truth. She is unused to being held with such unrelenting gentleness, and worse still, to the way it brings her to calm, like a ship coming to rest at harbour.

Worst of all is the way she is learning to crave it from him. Ragnelle knows her hunger well; always, she has wanted fiercely, and with a selfishness that seeks to own everything she claims as hers. It is why she lays claim to very little, apart from her home and the fields and forests it protects. She has only ever let herself want the small things, the ordinary things that none will fault her for wanting to possess entire: her mother’s lute, her father’s dagger, the scarlet wool gown her stepmother made, her palfrey. Her husband is a very different beast indeed, and she likes him too well to subject him to her greed, if she can help it.

She turns to the plums in her lap instead, picking through them until she finds an unbruised one to eat in slow bites. The juice drips over her skirts and she allows it, for they are unsalvageably damp at this point; her smock is soaked and certainly stained, and wetness trickles cool between her legs. A moment more, and she will need to get off the bed.

“It is not—worse,” her husband says at last, when she is halfway through her plum and thinking still over the unfamiliar weather of his eyes. “'Tis not a matter of virtue, or—understand, I do not fault you for choosing to free yourself in this way. I do not fault you for any freedom you have sought and won for yourself. I would not have you mistake me in this.”

He ducks his head to catch her gaze, holding it as if he, too, would have her read him as easily as she does his pleasure or want, both so clear in the sudden blackness of his eyes and the flush that blooms across his cheek. It reddens his ears, she has learned, which amuses her; it blooms down his chest and belly and then lower still, vulnerable and startlingly blood-hot in her hand, and—the slow give of him under her fingers. The choked, ragged sounds he makes, trapped in his throat. The way he gives himself up to her, spread open in their bed and trembling, facedown, making soft, panting noises and telling her to _move_ —Ragnelle, remembering, makes a noise of her own at the thought and watches his eyes on her darken.

"Oh _hush,_ " she says, and he catches the hand she shoves him with, bringing it to his knowing smile. “Ah, lady," he says against it, "in truth, all the king's court would grant there is little difference between marrying for a curse and marrying for lands or wealth or power or—or heirs, other than that curses come more seldom. It is only—” and he breaks off, then, so Ragnelle does him the courtesy of waiting and eats the other half of her plum, trying not to remember him slick and yielding around her fingers.

Really, any moment now she will get off the bed and go to put the rest of her harvest into a basin, and perhaps return to bed to do something about the wetness between her thighs, but her husband has her hand still, and is looking at her with something in his face that she is beginning to think of as a quiet, startled hurt, as if he were surprised to discover himself wounded. “It is only,” he says, choosing his words with even more care than is common to Gawain the thoughtful, Gawain the kind, “if the king had given Blanchemal to—Sir Kay, or to Gaheris—would you have wed them?”

“Not Sir Kay,” Ragnelle says immediately, wrinkling her nose up at the thought: Sir Kay, who comes too early to their door with eyes that linger too long when she is clad only in her smock; Sir Kay the too-familiar, who kisses her the way no true cousin would. She is planning, already, all the ways she will make him regret it. “Even were he to give me his word, he is too churlish to give himself wholly into my hands, as you did—and my stepdame’s working would not have been unbound else.” She smiles at him, trying to coax the jest back into the words. “I did not marry you _only_ for your lands, husband.”

He smiles back at her as if he thinks he should. She knows at once that she does not like it; it is a poor changeling for the soft, involuntary curve of his mouth when he sees her anew, or the sly humour sparking in his eyes when they catch glances across the table, mirth walking its crow’s feet into the corners of them. “My brother, then,” he says, and she sees he is determined to follow this through even if it wounds him grievously. It does not surprise her; she believes, now, that he will do what he has set his will and word to doing. But she does not understand what this wound is, that he would tear it further open, or what weapon it is that he is even now pressing himself steadily onto.

She will be truthful if she can, though, with him. So: “I do not know Sir Gaheris,” she says, “but if Blanchemal had been given to him and I knew he would make and keep such a vow, then yes. I would have wed him.”

Gawain nods, slow. “Ah,” he says, nothing more. 

Ragnelle frowns at him. It is a very strange riddle he is making of their marriage. “You would prefer that I married you only to loosen my stepdame's binding?” she tries, searching the twist of his mouth and the knot of his dark brows for answers. “Or that your brother had perhaps—ah, no. Truly, husband, I would understand what troubles you so, but if I do not put these plums away we will both be troubled by the terrible stain they will leave on our bedclothes. See, they have bled right through my skirts.”

The tension in his shoulders relents at this. He laughs, brow clearing, and releases her hand, but as she slips off the bed she cannot help stooping to press her lips to his shoulder, brown and sun-freckled from all his time out in the training yard. “Truly,” she says again, and tastes the woodsmoke and salt of his skin as she speaks, “I am not teasing you. Is it—a more noble deed? Has it to do with some arcane knight’s code of honour? I have not heard of such a thing, and my father and his fathers were all knights.”

Her husband turns his face into her hair, one hand coming up to catch at her hip. “It is not—it is not a noble custom in the slightest, or even a knight's,” he says, low and a little breathless as she directs her attentions to his collarbone, to the warm dip behind his ear. His hand slides down her thigh, slow and promising. “In truth, only the poorest ask this of their marriages, for they inherit little and—and bargain with nothing, and so may wed as they wish. Forgive me, lady, it was thoughtless of me to expect—certainly, no-one in all the king’s court would— _ah_ —and you have always been very clear. Indeed, the mistake lies in my corner—"

“You,” Ragnelle says, “are not being very clear at all,” and bites him, and Gawain makes a startled noise and laughs again, pulling back from her to search her eyes a moment. “It is only—” he begins, and breaks off again, scrubbing a hand through his curls. And then, helplessly, “you asked for me. You _asked_ —you knew—so well what you wanted, and you would not be put off, not even by the king, nor by the queen, nor by all the court in their scorn of you. You would accept nothing else but that I wed you, that everyone would _know_ we were wed, and—”

“Yes?” she says, more bewildered than ever, and then her husband says, “I thought it meant you wanted _me,_ ” and his mouth crooks up in a smile so full of rue at his own foolishness that Ragnelle finds herself reaching for him, unthinking. “Oh,” she says, “oh _no,_ love, no. It is not—perhaps, at the time, I did not—but I want you now, will you allow me this? I want you _now_ ,” and he makes a small, hurt sound in his throat and turns his face up for her mouth and the plums tumble out of her skirt and over the rushes in soft, soggy thumps and she does not, she does not care. 

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Source text: 'The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle', a 15th century poem [in Middle English (glossed with notes)](https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hahn-sir-gawain-wedding-of-sir-gawain-and-dame-ragnelle) or [translated into modern English prose](https://www.sfsu.edu/~medieval/romances/wedding_rev.html) (or [an okay-ish summary on wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_of_Sir_Gawain_and_Dame_Ragnelle)).
> 
> 2\. Forste-Grupp, Sheryl L. [_A Woman Circumvents The Laws of Primogeniture in 'The Weddyinge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell'_](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4174723?seq=1), 2002 (a paywalled article, unfortunately).
> 
> 3\. Tozer, Sally Elizabeth. [_The Politics of Politeness in The Wedding of Sir Gawain And Dame Ragnelle_](https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/trerecpro/2020/230643/TozerSallyElizabeth_TFM2020.pdf), 2020 (the pdf of a master's thesis).
> 
> Happy Yuletide, FitzKreiner!


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